 Oh my God, Ryan's like kind of close to the table. Yeah. Even though he like already moves to the low half. There could be in one room. Yeah. But he's dropping that going down. Fished on. That's CVMC. Yeah. Because I knew Barb wasn't coming with a tracing paper. I brought a bunch of different colors of boasts. Oh, you have some. I did find some. Oh, great. They're not quite big sheets she would have, but then flood prep last week. Okay. We found tracing paper in the bottom of the drawer. We had to pull all the drawers out. Really? Yeah. Because all our offices are in the basement, so maybe two flood flooded the basement of the city hall. So anytime we get flood warnings, we've got to go around and take all the violent cabinet drawers out, put them up. Because it was a Friday day, we had to make sure they were really up because no one would be around here weekend. So I found tracing paper. Well, it seems like everyone's here so we could get started. So we'll call the meeting to order. So I'll be leaving the meeting tonight as a little work session for us to get started on the city plan. This is to give Leslie a little bit of a break. The first thing that we'll do is approve the agenda. Does anyone have anything to add or change about the agenda? Okay. The demon approved. And then next we have comments from the chair. I don't have anything to add at all. There were some emails going around the last two weeks from the city. Is there anything notable? Maybe, Mike, if you can just go over the RFP. Because there were some comments about that. So they bring everyone up to speed on that because I don't think we've discussed that. Yeah. So the city, so we got a municipal planning grant last fall to do basically a master plan for State Street. And then throughout the winter, there was some additional projects in the downtown. And so there was a desire to expand that to be the entire basically the downtown core to do a downtown master plan, which I think a lot of us have talked about. But we did as a group. It's just been a little bit of a while. We need our memories refreshed. So that RFP went out over, well, two weeks ago. Oh, and since you don't work in state government, you might not know what RFP stands for. It means requests for proposals. When we ask for people to submit applications, we call them bids, to hire them to do the work. So when we say we put out an RFP, we're requesting that we receive bids from various consultants to basically do this work for us, which would be making a plan for State Street. Yeah. And now it'll be State Street, including Barry and Maine, Barry out to Hubbard, Maine out to I think school. And so we have a little bit of Langdon, a little bit of school, a little bit of Elm, but primarily just that downtown core. And the idea is to do streetscapes, because it really isn't going to change a lot. The streetscape that's identified for State Street is probably going to be replicated for those same concepts, because you want to have a consistent theme. So that's probably not a big stretch to continue that. But it's also going to do a land use analysis and do a little bit because it really came out of a discussion of the Confluence Park, which was discussed for Taylor Street. So the Taylor Street project, they're going to put at the Confluence of the North Branch in Winooski, they're going to put in a park. And then they wanted to do one on the other side where the pedestrian bridge comes over. We purchased three parcels over here. So the city now owns these parcels. We're going to put the bike path in. We're going to put the bridge in. And we've got one lot that's available for economic development and redevelopment. And we had another parcel that was going to be a parking lot. And the question came up, what should we do? Should we keep with that plan of a parking lot and economic development? Or should we make the parking lot smaller? Should we remove the parking lot altogether and have a bigger park? Do we still want to use the economic development lot for economic development? Or do we want that to be some kind of pocket park or something? So that was kind of the questions that came up. So what we wanted to be able to do was to have the consultant that's doing these downtown streetscapes to also take a look at our public assets that we have, the Jacobs parking lot, these three lots, the Heaney parking lot. We have some parking lots behind City Hall. And just kind of take a look at what our needs are based on what our land uses are. So do a little bit of a land use analysis and look at should we use this for parking? For example, if we take out the parking on Berry Street, which has been a long time proposal because we need to connect our bike path, if we take that parking out, we might need to have that parking lot to make up for those losses, those parking spaces. We just have to have a conversation where we start to balance things, not looking just isolated at one parcel. We really have to look at the downtown and go and say, what are our downtown needs? We know we don't have a lot of green space and we should do more to have more green space. But we also have to balance these other needs of if we want bike lanes, we might lose parking. How do we balance all of our needs to kind of satisfy everybody's goals with a very limited number of resources? So that's the third piece. So there'll be the State Street streetscape, the Main Street, Berry Street streetscape as part two. And then the third part is this lane use analysis to help guide and inform the Planning Commission and City Council on what should we do about what we call 12 Main Street. Can you repeat that recap again? So we're going to be looking at the State Street. The streetscape. Okay. State Street streetscape. Because that's the one that we already have a grant for, so we have to fulfill those grant obligations. Then we will do the streetscapes for the rest of the downtown core. Main Street and Berry and a few other smaller streets. And I remember us discussing that because it made sense to, you know, while we're already doing that, to kind of look at it more as a unit. So Berry Street, others. And that's also a streetscape. A streetscape. Yeah. That is a hard word. Okay. And then the third piece was looking at the lane use analysis and these other public parcels. And the State Street streetscape is triggered by the work on the bridge? Yeah. That was triggered by the fact that we have to replace that bridge in three or four years. So the hope is we've got a good conceptual plan that we might be able to talk about. Do we want to realign the curves to make wider sidewalks? The sidewalks are quite narrow on parts of State Street. It would be nice to have wider sidewalks. But if we're going to make wider sidewalks, something else has to go. On street parking, maybe a turn lane. You know, we really have to start to look at, you know, how could we make those wider? Other people may argue we want to have bike lanes. We want to have bike lanes. Same question. Where would we, who, what do we give up to have bike lanes? And does it make sense to give those up? And if we gave up parking, where would we replace that parking? So when do you think that, what's the timeline going to be as far as us having a product to look at? Well, April 12th is when it's, is when the, I think it's April 12th, when the RFP proposals are due. They would then have about a year to complete the project. But I think they're going to be touching base. Our discussions that we had before with the net zero winners, the team bridges and the other proposals, I think are going to factor in a lot more. So I think if we're going to invite team bridges, I would wait till after we have a consultant on board so we can have them hear that presentation as well. Because I think as they're working on this, we really should be integrating. If we're going to integrate it, that's where we would integrate those ideas into that downtown master plan. There may be pieces that are outside. You know, team bridges talked about remote parking and using the railroad as a shuttle to get people in and out of downtown. That may happen outside, but what happens in the downtown core, we should really have reflected in that downtown master plan. So do you anticipate getting proposals from entities like the team bridges? I mean, I know they're kind of a group. Yeah, we've, I've heard, I've received interest from at least three separate consulting firms right now. At a certain point, sometimes they start coming together. Sometimes two of them will come in, one will be a landscape architect and another one will be, you know, more in the traffic side. They might come together and put in single proposals. I'm not sure where they'll, if they'll start mixing together at a certain point. But right now, I know we have at least three interested consultants. Thanks for the update. Any more comments? I'll throw out one other quick one just to go and say that Wednesday we will be having the first, maybe the only potentially zoning, for the interim zoning, and we put that together and we forwarded that, the interim zoning for consideration. And so council will be taking that up on Wednesday. So they may hear it and vote that day. They may hear it, make some changes and want to have another hearing. Can you back up a little bit? Because I know we're having a public hearing on some changes, but what are they going to be hearing? They're hearing the interim changes, which were just the steep slopes, not buildable area, just steep slopes, 30%. The landscape? And the landscape rules. Right, we felt like those were a priority because they will impact projects that are being applied for for the spring construction season. And because it takes a long time for us, our hearing's not till April on the permanent changes, then it will be time before it goes to council and then council will have to have hearings. And so those probably won't be ready till the end of June before they're actually adopted. By then, we've kind of missed a chunk. So hopefully this gets the important fixes through so we can get some good projects moving. Do you think you'll need one of us on hand to explain anything? Wouldn't hurt. I will be there and they have been, the council has been briefed on it already, so... What time is it? This one will be starting at 7. So the public hearing is scheduled for 7.15. So it was initially warned for 6.45, then council had a meeting set up, an executive session that's going to go 6.00 to 7.00, so they had to push the zoning hearing to 7.15. I could feasibly make up anyone else who actually had a birthday party to go through after that, so... Oh, right. Okay, so I'll plan unless we hear through email, someone else wants to attend and represent us, which is open. Any other business? Okay. So, the business number four on the agenda, general business, comments from the public, and there's no one here, so we can move past that to our work on the city plan, which is where things become kind of structured, I guess. We have tracing paper and we have loads of ideas. Anybody have an idea about where to start? Sorry, I got a text message. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Is it a text from the Future Council year? No, it's just all... No, it's just all... Oh, and I'm going to take notes, and I'll type those up and email them around and potentially put them on the website. Yeah, so we could potentially project this, although do we have an HTML table? That sounds like a fancy word for dongle. Need some sort of conversion. I can go get one of those if you want. Are these maps the same, except this one's a bit more zoomed in? Yeah, this one is supposed to be town-wide, as much as possible. It captures most of it. This one is zoomed into the downtown. Where are the actions at? Thank you for asking, Nick. I was trying to figure it out. This is never the same. I feel like I should know this. Where is that? It's a true question. It's actually very... This is my failure of putting Mercury's in red. You're right. Yeah, it's... I put two... links to two maps up on our plan website. One is one that I made in August 2017, and probably could be updated, but I haven't had time to do that. I guess if people have ideas on what could be on it. I could do that instead of going through and seamlessly adding or removing things. And then the other one is just a map that everyone here has access to that you can add points to or lines or draw on and add to a maintain, evolve, transform sort of funding commission workspace. Do you want to just go over the transform, evolve, maintain language? We could all use the recap. Yeah. You're just our excuse to remember things we shouldn't know. So, so heading up some, we have to come up with a city plan. And that has various components to it that we need to include. One of those should be something that articulates vision. What are we, why are we doing this? And a good way to do that is to try to document like what about our city do we want to change or not change. So, someone should be able to look at a map and it's not only things that can be mapped, but a helpful way to do it and understand like in Montpelier in 20, 30, 50 years what's going to be different about it. And making sure that we all understand or that we're working towards a common vision is important. So, going through an exercise where we start just putting it down on paper even if we don't all agree or that it's all crystal clear can just be a good way for us to identify things that everyone agrees with or maybe need more work and then we can start to prioritize how to get there and how that will happen. So, the idea of putting things into baskets around what do we want to maintain so what do we like about Montpelier and what do we need to take actions to make sure that doesn't change or what do we want to completely transform and then the third category is what do we want to evolve so maybe it's not something in between the two. So, that's generally the concept around maintain, evolve, transform, mapping, exercise and it's a good way to if we're going to collect information from other people we can do away with those labels if we want we can just ask, you know, what do you want to change about Montpelier if you could change anything and we have a tool now that Stern Environmental is working with Public Works that I think we should be able to use to gather input from Montpelier's citizens as soon as I can get the keys to it I probably set something up Stone should be able to take a lot of those map layers that we have and make them interactive but then meanwhile I just created a simple Google map that we can all edit and have access to and anyone can go to it but unless they are they've been included, never given editor privileges so do we have Montpelier got one of these guys I doubt it not even one of those I don't even know what that is can you go to that one can you log into do you want to put it in mine do we have that'll work actually I can get old school technology my computer hands are it's all in there there we go I can hit the lights it's just the one that says council otherwise we'll get the gardening club over here three different notes after repeated repeatedly turning off other people's lights so on our website which at some point you probably need to figure out what's going on here how we're using it but I think it would help to set aside some time to kind of coordinate our efforts and how we're how exactly we'll use it if you go down to the bottom of the home page and just put these links up here I have the original of the painting right there in my home you'll see two links one is for a map with layers for the plan and another maintainable transform so this was one that created back a while ago if you click the little sheets of paper that are stacked here it'll open up some layers that you can toggle on and off you can see they include building footprints that are colored by use our river corridors flood hazard areas parcels sidewalks, wetlands etc natural communities from the conservation committee probably like an old zoning districts proposal that we should remove because this was before I think we adapted the zoning our sewer mains, water mains various paths etc so so we made some of our zoning district decisions based on where the sewer mains and water mains ended just for people's history and one of the things we'll eventually need to include in the plan is statue requires us to include a land use map a future land use map transportation plan a utilities plan and then another one that's more natural resource focused so we'll have a lot of these components be separate maps included in the plan but the maintainable transform one is really take all of those into consideration and come up with more of a vision statement if you want so this map is just essentially should serve as a reference point and I can add or remove things as people want we can even feed our maintainable transform points into this map if we want to have that as a layer to toggle on enough so when you say add you don't mean just toggle that little check mark you mean adding a whole other layer to that list exactly yeah so in the evolve maintainable transform and I did this several months before coming here so I came up with examples that are possibly not appropriate or the best but and I created again these three categories transform maintain and one for placeholder for questions or comments so if you were to to log in and I'm guessing we're logged in as Leslie because this opened in edit mode if it were someone not logged in or who doesn't have added access it just you don't have the ability to edit it but with this you can essentially just add a point or a line if you wanted so let's say we wanted to transform the historical society museum which I don't know why we would we probably don't want to do that at all but it's listed as point three so do away with history this is a good thing you're editing yeah museum of the future do away with the museum oh my goodness I got married by the way let's not do that maybe the last to get married there now and you can add a description save it go there maybe we decide to change that from a different category move it there and you can order them they'll change the sequence of the numbers it'll be easier to see what the different are there and we can just take that and have it feed into the other map as a layer if we'd like we can also export it or view it as a table we can add different categories if we want aside from just description if we wanted to have it priority ranking or whatever we wanted to do but do we want to put in some right now just try it out so here I put in main street shots stone cutter intersection make safer and pedestrian oriented as a transform here pedestrian connection between national life and downtown transformational could be the revive rail line for commuter rail service that's one that has been proposed by team bridges and a number of other people are looking into that that would be a transformative project it's not something that's here we're not evolving and making it better we're completely adding something new so we could do it as a line but I'm not going to trace the entire railway light rail yeah it's just well there are two proposals one that's going to team bridges and we've actually been doing trying to do a study getting some funding for a study which would look at just the Washington County line so it goes from Montpelier junction to Barry city and the idea is that could be just a light rail commuter trolley type system we'd look at what cost effectiveness whether it would work that would allow for much better access if you wanted to have commuter lots if you wanted to move parking lots to the outside that would work much better because if you lived in Barry city and worked in Montpelier you could just go down to the museum and park jump on the rail line you'd probably be faster using a rail shuttle to Montpelier than you would actually driving your car in the traffic the other discussion that's been going on which is more statewide and we haven't been involved as much in our folks who want to connect Montpelier to Burlington in Essex using the high speed line on I-89 so that would be a much bigger different project I think it's involved in that in the state I mean Blittersdorf is a private individual who has interest in trying to see that happen so he's kind of putting his own money in his own capital behind it to try to see if he could get that to work he's bought bud cars which are vehicles that would be able to make that journey but there's a lot of cost involved in actually doing it something like we'd have to subsidize it to the tune of around 300,000 dollars per rider just buy everyone a house yeah so that idea is still being pushed and considered so I'm sure it's one that would at least make it on our list of things for conversation whether we decide to include it in our final plan would probably come with a lot of input from the transportation committee and the public on whether that's something we want to pursue or if that's just an idea that we're going to get a lot of ideas that people are just going to give us the line right now we can all agree totally useless space something should happen whether or not it's a rail we probably don't know but that may just be an outcome of the plan that we have a study or dedicated resources to figuring out how to effectively use that space I think the same thing could apply to the waterfront there too right maybe we don't know exactly how we'd like to transform it but it seems like everyone in the city has an interest in wanting to see it be used better the waterfront strip along the rail line there does all those parking lots start to catch up no I think had a totally separate idea so it's better to continue with this conversation you accidentally add points you can delete them by hitting the garbage can select so what do people want is useful is it like that's nice is it give it a try we can decide whether or not it's a good fit for us plug in some more ideas so we can take this and just put it on our website just like initial thoughts brainstorming session so one I have I don't think it's been part of any of the proposals but the base of national life drive if you run down it then you're kind of stuck running on a highway without a shoulder to get to the bike path there needs to be some sort of connection pedestrian access whether it's by a green mountain drive or there's a crossing to get to the green mountain drive to get to the bike path it has been talked about and the reason why it's difficult is because it's technically a limited access highway and you're not supposed to have sidewalks on a limited access highway so that's where what's the I would say add pedestrian access to connect national life drive and green mountain drive I think that's in our gap analysis that we did for the complete streets plan that was identified there are a couple of options that have come up for how to fix that move green mountain drive down to make national life drive and green mountain drive a four way and therefore you could put a light there green mountain drive doesn't have the problems anymore and that would exit into that parking lot for green mountain power what about U32 is there a need for some non motorized connection through is that something if you could bike or ski to U32 to the art college of finance I think a lot of these will be able to populate through those various plans that we have the complete streets plan identifies a number of gaps that need to get fixed I think there's a green print that I think came up parks and those guys they have a plan that would talk about just like that a line that would connect those on its way across I think the gap analysis talks about sidewalk from U32 down to we have a high school but we don't have sidewalk on callous and hill I don't believe so you don't have walking you can't walk there if you happen to be a student we really should have bike lanes and at least a sidewalk on one side I think cars drive very fast it's a shortcut it's tempting to because it's so wide you can also add photos to I've seen deer though I saw a dozen deer on college last night crossing the streets maybe just one after the other yeah just like a huge club do we get rid of the deer yes eradication plan for college street area so the idea with this map is that we would all take individual time and think about it because I'm just my beginning thinking about it and I'd like time to do it but I wasn't sure if it was visual so maybe that's what we're discussing yeah I mean I think it would be great if you over next while we think about it even take photos with your phone and you can add those that'll like really bring it to life I think if you see something you're like I would like that to change in my opinion or I really like that and we should identify that as something we value are we concerned about becoming unwieldy when we start to have several dozen points up here or is that kind of the idea I think that's the idea and then when we have some of these meetings maybe we can go through and consolidate clear some out or categorize or we can see how see how it goes I've not done this so yeah I think eventually we would be kind of breaking it into the different we'll eventually be thinking about it on a chapter by chapter level I mean at this scale we're just getting ideas down to talk about but at a certain point when we start talking about the historic resources chapter we're gonna have that discussion of the historic museum and we're gonna have that discussion about do we match our design review to our historic district you imagine before we even get there that we start bringing in the committee's feedback right I guess we could incorporate this along the same way yeah or well we'll have like the town wide I think survey tool we can see if there are any patterns that emerge there we could if we have our stuff done a good amount of it done first we can have it as a base layer that people could also potentially either you know, vote up or down or something along those lines so that they're not just adding to things that are obvious and then the the other part that maybe go into Leslie's email so but is the spreadsheet or the tables that I worked with Barbara on to give the committee's guidance how they could submit what their goals are and their strategies that would relate to those so to have them list goals that you can measure that someone could say yes we met that or no we didn't and then how do we measure that list of whatever related strategies are that's a little bit of the piece that I've been trying to work on in between meetings is to try to go and start to pull some language together so that way the committees when they start to meet to talk about this they're not starting with with nothing you know what do we already have in our plans that talks about you know what are our aspirations what are our goals and then say that these are just places to start the conversation and maybe they're pretty close to what everybody thinks maybe they're not but at least it's a place for people to start thinking and it helps to when you see it written out to go and see how you would do something similar to that so do you want to we want to practice doing some more I mean I think it helps me to do it a few times so we can determine what what falls into which basket we've got the we did a few transform evolve I mean I think we want to increase affordable housing I don't know how we would signify that on the map maybe there's certain spots when we want to encourage it yeah and it doesn't need to be it doesn't need to be perfect yeah so it may be one that would just go into the questions and comments maybe affordable housing maybe something that just doesn't fit on a point yeah discussion right if we knew there was one well some savings pasture is a great place for this I mean can you make like broad area like you just do points you can draw and make broad area you can draw lines you have to click the pencil there we go but in general I think we want to increase housing opportunities in and around our we've been walking distance of our our downtown many to revisit what we think the radius is for that I know we've had discussions in here before and I remember debating like a mile and a half two miles what's actually walkable de-factor in Hills schools too because like the whole Bailey Avenue place you walk a whole mile and that can make people also builds character especially in winter especially in winter it's nice that they are that's considered walkable though that they are actually walking from that we tend to focus in and around the downtown I mean just as an example of a maintain you could we might get comments from a place like College Street or by VCFA to maintain the historic character of this residential neighborhood or street past we might get comments about maintaining the character of a neighborhood whether it's historic or not historic town Hill may say we want to maintain the yeah I think we avoid ever putting the word character it's meaningless there's got to be something about it I think you're right we're going to get that comment but I don't know that we need to put it in right now or we should encourage them to articulate what about what we're measuring I think what people do though is they fall back on density and things and that's what I'm scared of I'm scared of people focusing on things that aren't really preserving the character but they're measurable things that people can get behind we're going to talk about facades there's a density there's a measure of housing but we see it over and over so yeah how do we how do we talk about character and leave room for building out housing and all the other goals we have let's identify what about that character makes it that we value architectural detailing you know scale and massing and if so what about it those are all like tangible things that's my property value that's also something we could look at I should add probably a layer right 3D rendering of property value per acre we probably want to increase the value of properties in Montpelier where you want these levels of services so what kinds of development what does that look like there are clear patterns the stuff we built ironically the stuff we built after zoning is worth a lot less than per acre basis than what we built before zoning so we need just zoning in general not our recent zoning changes no no no zoning in Montpelier zoning in Montpelier this planning commission ruined it I think that's a great point about defining character it's going to be one of the biggest challenges but we don't have to define it we can focus on actual things exactly so what does that mean I'm going to store a major plus street name for you no I'm not going to put that one there we can put what do we do over here there's been some talk about necki leaving right is that something we want to you know signal that we would like to keep them here I don't know if we can do it through this book yeah maintaining presence of schools you know beyond the public school system having higher education available is important I think those would both fall into our education plan which we're required to have in our economic development plan which we're required to have both of which are going to touch on those maintaining those opportunities do you have any input on that on the kickoff meeting right one question we had during the zoning is for a number of these areas what is the right what is the vision we already had a meeting for how the park fails what about a park in district 3 I don't know my districts that's the south basically behind my house behind my house park behind Leslie's house she's going to donate her backyard in fact actually we have a conflict of interest it's certainly in the council's goals has been to study that so that could be a question or comment do we want to have access to because the closest playground to me is elementary school it's pretty much the only one playground in district 3 that would be a transformer and evolve there's not much there to evolve sugary farm we own 50 acres so we have a donor for the park that's excellent I'm not going to start adding candidates but if we understand like these points are not intended to be exact someone sees like a part of my property I think it evolved that's along the same lines as what we just did that's more of an evolved transformer to evolve the winter recreational environment I feel like things don't have to be so dead in winter and I think this goes into economic development some other things climbing gym greenhouse there's like attractions that could be like a winter or give you something to do in a winter what's the status of the stump dump what do you mean by status still a dump what is it open who controls it can we do anything with it it is public works it is public works it is primarily used it is used as a stump dump still it is the old city landfill so it is a has a classification in there for that but it's used for the stump it is also used for snow dump as well it is one of our last ones we have left that's what we used my street for oh dumping snow let's just plow it there and leave it because that's what's been happening there's not enough space to deal with all this snow the unfortunate part is we've lost a number of our snow dumps with changing rules so we used to use a lot of our floodplains for snow storage and we can't use our floodplains for snow storage anymore did some snow into a whiskey it happens a lot it happens a lot curvy's deck, not even just your window of all of the various private used to be floodplains though there used to be a large snow dump under the I-89 so they used to just go down there and dump it on the land and let it melt there but we can't use that one anymore my first floor of my house is very thankful but that doesn't happen anymore because it's not at much risk of being underwater oh well we have to right spill how about we maintain the protection of the flood floodplains river corridor thanks Mike Aaron was there one of the snow dumps that you wanted to add? no I was just curious there was an opportunity there that was not being there were some trails definitely yep there is the trails do come in and go around it on the hillside south side of it that was finally updated the stump dump road was it called stump dump road? it was because there were no other houses on it so it used to be just called dump road and then we changed it to stump dump road and then once a residential development appeared on the north side of the road they requested that their mailing address not be stump dump road seems like at the least we could come up with multiple uses out there like have there not been rather than just one we studied it for the solar we studied it for solar and it didn't work for solar the way the landscaping the hill kind of goes up and so that's why we ended up with the city solar farm is at log road instead which is just a little bit farther north what's going on with redstone? there was an auction so that is a state owned was a state owned still is a state owned goldenman won the bid but they I think it's been a little bit of time but he hasn't yet closed on purchasing it from the state he's won the bid but hasn't closed on it so we don't know what's going to happen with it until that step happens do you intend to connect to the long trail from there or am I thinking of something yeah that was in the newspaper he said that he owns a number of owns a lot of land hundreds and hundreds of acres and so his land goes from there he owns the land that's all the trees to the west and a lot of that extends out towards the Worcester range where he thought if there was an organization that could help connect some other parcels that you might be able to connect to Worcester where we could connect up with the long trail really nice using your as far as big housing transformations though yeah that right there that would be great for housing that's walking downtown closer than Bailey right good for high school students part of the city plan but human services like I feel like we didn't hear much about that from maybe the groups that worked on that meeting but has there been any talk of the human service community and what resources are important and what they might find out what are some of the human services well like I don't know I'm thinking my husband is on the board of a drop-in center for psychiatric survivors like though I'm just thinking I'm going to promote yeah I mean just for the because I don't know sometimes talking about all the smart growth and stuff is great and the energy stuff but I feel like we're talking to a certain group of people in Montpelier and I just have wondered about other people in Montpelier and what their needs are so community services we will have a chapter and I think we have to have a chapter on services and so community services will be one of those chapters so we have a senior center we have not just recreation facilities which might be on a facilities plan but we also have services that go along with that daycare after school programs so as planners we kind of have these three bubbles that overlap in a lot of ways so the stuff we always focus in on are those built natural resource pieces you know a lot of what we talked about here streets and sewers and all these other things and then you've got this second bubble which is economic development and then there's the third bubble which is people and that actually ironically ends up being the one that we forget about the most or those social capital and it's more difficult to plan for them but at the same time those are just as valid planning topics and talk about equity and those types of issues social equity racial equity has a place put in a point somewhere downtown which anywhere downtown I think maybe coming up with some organizations to reach out to to get ideas from I think down streets one in each each chapter again we talk about education we have adult basic education services so even when within our education chapter we might talk about the school facilities and how much they could support and how much capacity they have we can really talk about it in a bricks and mortar nuts and bolts kind of way but we can also talk about it's linked to economics and how are we doing a good job of preparing kids for future economic opportunities and we can also talk about the social human interaction and those services that are available to people that aren't physical they're about job training and retraining so identify human service related needs and priorities so I'd always encourage when those types of things come up because that's always going to be the thing that I'll call that my fault my weakness is the human services and the social services and remembering to include that component so if you think we're missing something it probably means we are and we should be thinking about one thing I'm aware of is that the entire state needs is recovery beds so for drug addiction the state's done a lot in the last few years to help with treatment and you can get at least some treatment relatively easy compared to how it used to be now but then recovery after treatment there's almost nothing and almost everything that does exist is in Burlington so that was one thing I was going to bring up was it fits into housing that we're talking about fits into both but having more of that yeah there was a lot of work that was done in the housing committees about homelessness in the past couple of years and that's one that we talk a lot about housing but we don't talk about what are the services that are needed to support that transition from homelessness back to housing it's been silent the past year at least on my front downstairs so certainly when the zoning was going through there was a lot of discussions about the potential and possibilities but ultimately at the end we haven't heard much but that's not to say that there isn't something somewhere percolating but nothing that has made its way to my office downstairs yes yeah Zorsi, Aja, family although the parcel if you look to the left of the screen west there that part of that is owned by the college so you see that one field that's owned by the college so there has been discussion of a potential project of a cottage cluster senior housing facility to go in there but I didn't put slopes on here but that's also yeah slopes plays a big part of all these discussions for those but it's a good got some good day layers in there so those I don't have yeah this was last year haha it's a good struggles to get see a bit of snow still yeah we removed the museum yeah we did I deleted that that's a good loss before that goes public get rid of it I'll get a call from Eric Gilbertson in the morning talk about moving forward forward towards the street yeah there's been a proposal because there is an application certainly it's not a secret there has been the old gas station that was at the corner was purchased and demolished there will be a proposal to redevelop at that site there was a discussion about potentially trying to move faux capitol back up to the street but that as far as I know has not materialized so I think they're still moving forward with their plan to build a new structure safe to say that for this portion of parking here that we're going to work towards a maybe better use of it over time yeah no about that greenhouse indoor water park people would come if you build it they will come five storey skateboard park cool would be great just small yeah greenhouse where you could walk around somewhere where it's actually warm cool is a lot of space back there that part of the capitol complex like this it's not in the capitol complex but the state owns the parking lot to the left right there that's owned by and then the other gray parking is owned by the insurance company and then it goes to the federal courthouse parking we heard some proposals to put a garage in behind 133 state and that seemed like something that was appealing to put a garage in there that is opposed to the pit which is much more complicated with multiple landowners this one's just the state the state wanted their own parking they probably would be opting for one over here because I think that the parking lot near where the garden park is in the river we should try to move away from that one the right there transform it to green space or or any type of redevelopment who's residential or yeah we have to engage the river there yeah we're gonna surprise though we'll have to be like a mid-rise sort of thing like the teller a lot yeah I think this goes to the most of the projects that we saw for net-zero Montpelier competition there were a lot of ideas in there that we could certainly kind of throw into that site what about this gateway and try to raise this earlier well I've got the question over here what our vision is really this entire area to the east and the south and then the neighborhoods up here if anything are there needs and what have they articulated what's happening in that space where the restaurant is nothing yet well I think we need some sort of connector pedestrian connector I mean people can walk up and down Northfield Street but it's pretty busy and it doesn't even after the project was Northfield Street project was done yeah it doesn't go north or south we'll have to see the gap analysis see if that's another one that we flagged but I know one of the goals that we had before when we did the zoning was that we wanted we may not get mixed use neighborhoods people like their residential neighborhoods but we did want them to be walkable to an area where they might have some and this is an area that really other than the hotel doesn't have that many opportunities for you live in this district too? no I live here but my parents are in a apartment building oh okay I'm the only one on this commission who lives in that part of town everyone else lives in districts one and two it's from the sole voice for District 3 here no I think the whole commission thinks comprehensively about the city I don't know but yeah and then there's sort of that John since you were in that neighborhood there's that residential neighborhood oh you're classifying everything behind national life and over there it's part of one I see and I put improved neighborhood connectivity yeah do you want to put something near the economy like development of a restaurant or a bar that would be pretty sweet right there big fan of nice British pub or something that would be great with some trivia on a different day no we don't it's still owned by the Econolodge folks fish and chips a pub would do well no to people watching but I'm sure when we talk to our Laura and the folks who are doing economic development they would certainly be looking for sites that are available for redevelopment and that might be one of them at the same time transportation may come in and say that's a great place for our park and ride lot to the downtown so we'll probably get a couple of different ideas from folks that we would have to weigh I don't know what national life is up to it does feel like it's an underused area with more potential through these incredible views that get used once a year we've had the proposal for the gondola up to national life to get people up there and then the proposal to have residential development up there so it becomes more of a village it would have the residential and these other opportunities it's all owned by national life so it's something they would have to either partner on or support I seem to be very engaged in the community support basically their name is on every event I've seen every single playbill run out of ideas John we're done should we but it helped to delegate things for each of us to kind of interest that we have to come back with some ideas for like looking at human services organizations to reach out to may as well leverage leverage that anything else we need to come back in we can probably get a well maybe this goes within the same template of the other sort of goals but a non-matte list of what our vision maybe strategies are add that to the page in our Google Drive we have the notes from the top priorities from various committees maybe we could all just review that and plug in some of the ideas that we thought are a good idea and maybe a specific homework item for you Emery is to think about any kind of complaints or ideas you've heard from people who are into Drive I hear like a lot like everybody who lives like past Northfield Street like about how dark and shady it is kind of like on the walk like there's no sidewalks really maybe more lights but there's still people making that walk all the way up to that little like number eight yeah is there a bus or is it there's no buses from Middle School but what's it the number eight is that just where they live yeah it's just kind of do they live in that area I usually walk down here but now that they've had some logging yeah occasionally gone down this way and it's just not fun yeah I mean it's better than it used to be with the project the recent project I used to I run up and down and sometimes come into work and it has improved but it's just a very narrow area so that there's a lot we can do for expanding it are there other map layers to be any ideas of things that people would like to see put the slopes up property values you can do that yeah the values we based on the city's appraisal I take it we can adjust it with the CLA we can just leave it as our doesn't change much between when you're comparing across I would raise everybody CLA we're CLA common level of appraisal so it's just a factor that the tax department calculates and will multiply for the purposes of the equalization payments for schools just it's to make up what you're trying to compare more pillar to other towns but we're not really doing that but it's always a good interesting model to take a look at when you're looking at various projects because you think one tractor supply that must be worth this much and then you start realizing how much like if that were five houses five houses would have generated more taxes than one tractor supply is because okay like China Star and the tattoo place you know Matt what most people would think of as high rent places but this one parcel generates a lot of tax revenue per acre because it's used so efficiently it has something like 20 apartments and 3 businesses in it so if you take that and you multiply that over a block that's a tremendous amount of value compared to other maybe less efficiently used places around town I haven't been in the discussion about stone cutters way it seems just kind of random that we've got a street just kind of nestled in there I'm sure that Tom McCartle could give a nice broad history of that because it was state rail yard and I don't know if it's still owned by the state and we lease it or if it has actually been transferred to the city I think that would be a nice pedestrian I've also heard they all have one way street and they carry one way street especially in the winter that sounds like a great idea because Barry is absolutely worth buying they both are right I mean it's just been a really terrible year for that I read it in the bridge you can tell I don't know if this is a point for the map but I think it's something we have to think about as we have these downtown discussions and that's the existence of the brown fields and there's contaminated sites so we should all be aware of that but it's something that's going to definitely affect what actually gets built or what happens because it puts limitations on especially the cost of putting something in each of these sites and my understanding is pretty much all along the river there because there used to be industrial stuff pretty heavy in Montpelier at one point before there was a lot of regulation there's economic development opportunities in this area too oh yeah down in the Montpelier grain works and those other buildings in there I think proposed for redevelopment how do we bring the butcher shop back can we just put that on here I would take that but I think there's a lot of there's opportunity in that area and and now there's we do need to so there you go so the gateway near there we brought that up it's kind of related to this area of the city it seems like you can commute by foot between the two of those are we thinking like industrial for the gateway because that seems like the only place that you're having for this area yeah what is the past Vermont trail are they doing something or it's being built right where you see the words Vermont patient alliance it's going along that old country club road and then it goes down and it's coming back out over by Agway one of the tough questions that a lot of communities struggle to address and deal with is when it comes to characterizing the purpose of various roads and streets is we have streets that are places for people we have businesses that people should take priority in terms of the design of the functions so it's okay we have other road infrastructure that are designed or should be designed to move large volumes of vehicles so you know obvious one is there's a 89 so it's best to pick one and go forward with that and often times people try to split the difference and they think they can make both so then you have all these trip generating uses with curb cuts on roads that are intended or originally were intended to move lots of cars that then become congested and are terrible places for people to walk on and they now no longer serve any function in terms of they're not great at moving cars they're not great places for people they end up being very expensive in terms of infrastructure and very low in terms of yielding tax values so they become a net loss they increase our taxes because they are paying for the infrastructure that they're using so identifying what are areas that will be that we are going to consider streets and invest in for things like sidewalks and other areas where really they should be limited in terms of uses that generate trips and we're not going to be places where we want to encourage high levels of activity and oftentimes things like industrial uses could be good potential this is where they require maybe more space they don't generate as much traffic or the traffic that they generate is maybe more truck oriented and you don't want on your streets so that's you know discussion we can have around some of these spaces over here I don't know it's not something we've talked about much it seems like our options are actually quite limited it seems like we too is in through it too it's about it as far as having the options right for us the traffic moving type options yeah and where does it start and end and we had a lot of discussion with that in our complete streets plan the street typology so as we get into talking about the transportation plan that's what we would probably be talking about those exact things that they had to address when they were looking at that which is what would be our perfect river street and Berlin street if we were to lay it out we would have x for vehicle traffic and we need pedestrians if we're doing complete streets we have to address how the pedestrians move through here how the bikes move through here how the cars move through here and we have to make sure we've accommodated all of them and in some cases with north field street we have failed to provide for all of our users we aren't addressing how pedestrians move through this space so that would be flagged in our transportation plan as a deficiency that they may take you know some of these may take we're missing sidewalks on east state but that's because it would cost three quarters of a million dollars to build the retaining wall to keep that sidewalk going on east state just because there's just a cliff there so some things just take time and lots of money to fix but it's still there as a need it just may be more difficult to fix yeah right over cliff there's the sidewalk gap a little bit further up I think yeah that's where it crosses over it's the edge where it crosses and there should be you know it's a pretty busy area that that road has enough pedestrian traffic that it should have sidewalks on both sides but it has a gap should we shut this down it sounds like we should take this back up after public hearings I think we should do a little adding things in between so we'll take a look can you go through how you got here again so if you go to if you go to montp.city we'll plan.montp.city it'll take you to the same place and you go all the way to the bottom of this page there's links to the two maps here and these are open just to planning commissioners at this point or is it open to the public anyone can see them but they won't be able to add but they write and if you log in with your gmail addresses which all of you have then you can edit them out and if you can't edit send John and send me a note you can also edit he can make sure anyone so should we so we just have a place on the agenda then to revisit like every time just to see if anyone has anything so they can go over with the group and in that way track like what we do in between meetings we didn't add anything at all I'm prepared to something to add on that meeting read a plan come up with something is there like a broad timeline for this good city plan my yeah my hope has been that there's 12 chapters at a minimum so that's going to take time to work its way through so I've kind of said if we were done by the end of and I mean like done with the whole plan and ready to go to public hearing by the end of 2020 I'd be happy or even if it was adopted I would be shocked just because it takes once we've come up with stuff and once we've gone to the committees inclusive it takes time if we want to write our own plan and just roll it out then we'll get crushed but we can get it done faster so we really want to come up with proposals work with the committees work with the public and I think we'll end up with a very really strong plan within that time frame we could also hear where's if you go the energy part here it takes you to this folder in Google Drive which has the tables and spread and everyone loves spreadsheets so there are other ways to kind of make this more accessible but this has the idea of the vision the goals with target date data source priority ranking strategies have it so that committees if they wanted if we wanted to set these up for committees can basically select when they think it's ready to go to the PC and they can have it all come together in one place and a lot of this is some of the stuff I'm going to be trying to kind of get prepared to help set the table for them because it is a little bit complicated and we had some models on how to have the conversation so it was consistent and how they all connected together between your aspirations or your visions and your goals and your strategies a couple of notes on these minutes your computer back I didn't shut it out you probably want this though thanks a lot for your work John yeah this is a long time except for that other man he's still great he was stay does anyone have anything else about the city plan I think we can move on to the minutes and move to the minutes we'll have some edits I think we'll have some edits John has made the motion do we have a second so we can start discussion we can second alright Aaron's got a second except Leslie's edits under on the first page under the final punch list item rezoning fixes the last second sentence but it says the administrative officer should have a way of settlements or coming into compliance or upcoming I should be for coming into compliance I believe alright the section was too restricted okay that's the first edit second edit second page under the motion to warrant a hearing on bracket date blah blah blah the second sentence says the best way to process with the city plan I think that should be proceed instead of process oh proceed I had planning oh where are you where are you and then the final edit is right above the adjournment the last sentence before adjournment is the motion passed on a three to zero vote with those who have been in attendance in that meeting I am fairly certain that I also joined that vote so it was a four zero because I knew we needed for our motion to carry final for action is everyone okay with the changes should we vote on approving the minutes with Leslie's changes assuming John yes adapts them in his motion yeah I pre-accepted the he pre and post accepted we'll take it so with Leslie's changes friendly amendment blah blah we have a vote all in favor all against the lawyers get to blah blah blah rules okay the minutes are approved and that leaves us with number seven adjournment wait a second okay not debatable yeah thank you all we do have to vote on that Kirby